About
Members
Projects
Events

Toxic Life Podcast: Episode One

A Dirty, Dirty World: A conversation between with Françoise Vergès





In this episode of the Toxic Life podcast, co-hosts Krista Lynes and Ayesha Vemuri talk with feminist, decolonial scholar Françoise Vergès about her most recent book, "Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism" (2025). We discuss the racial and gendered dynamics of the work of cleaning, the denial of people's elemental rights to clean air and water, how an abolitionist framework is the answer to racial capitalism, and how we live with toxicity from a place of love.


Show notes:

Françoise Vergès, Making the World Clean (2025)


This episode was recorded on February 6, 2026.
Image description: An olive-green square with a translucent photo of Françoise Vergès, captured in her office while recording this episode over Zoom. Text reads, “A Dirty, Dirty World: A conversation between with Françoise Vergès”.

More Info

   

The Toxic Life Podcast is co-hosted by FMS Director Krista Lynes and research fellow Ayesha Vemuri. Production and music by Piper Curtis.

Thank you to the members of the Toxic Life Working Group, our administrator Alba Clevenger, as well as the Feminist Media Studio and the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University.
Find this and future episodes wherever you get your podcasts.

 

Concordia University
Communications & Journalism (CJ) Building
CJ 2.130, 7141 Sherbrooke St. W.
Montreal, Quebec H4B 1R6
Canada

Space Accessibility




Connect
Instagram / Facebook / Twitter / Vimeo / Newsletter

info@feministmediastudio.ca
514 848 2424 ext.5975

The Feminist Media Studio is located on the unceded lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. We seek to stand in solidarity with Indigenous demands for land restitution and reparations.


  
Our work—committed to intersectional and anti-colonial feminist praxis—actively engages and names the predicament of doing feminism on stolen land. We acknowledge that territorial acknowledgement is insufficient to stand in solidarity with Indigenous communities.
Our anti-colonial and decolonial efforts articulated in our Lab Values center resisting extraction in all its facets, de-centering feminist canons, valuing methodologies that oppose white supremacy, and building good relations with human and more-than-humans.
Website by Natasha Whyte-Gray, 2024.    
All Rights Reserved.